[MUSIC PLAYING] Today is February 5th, 2026. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-minus. 22nd to LOS, T-dred. Open aboard. Right side. [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] Five. European security officials are warning that Russian space vehicles have intercepted communications from at least a dozen key European satellites. Montana State University has been awarded a grant to study the impact of atmospheric turbulence in quantum laser communication links between ground stations and space terminals. Interloon has been awarded a NASA Small Business Technology Transfer Phase 1 contract to support several NASA missions. The US House, Science, Space, and Technology Committee unanimously approved a new NASA authorization bill. What? AT&T, AWS, and Amazon Leo have announced a new partnership. [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] Lift off. [MUSIC PLAYING] Today's guest is Ryan Kirby, junior partner at Alderman & Company. And I caught up with Ryan at Commercial Space Week about trends in mergers and acquisitions in the space industry. And Ryan will be sharing his insights with us about all of that later in today's show. [MUSIC PLAYING] If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the AT. [GUNSHOTS] [SCREAMING] OK, OK. We are not starting with a call to Mr. T to come and rescue us, though that would be needed at some point soon. But the A team feels like the right title for today's top story. AT&T, AWS, and Amazon Leo have announced a new partnership. See who's all A's. And we're suckers for AT's TV anyway. So the big A players are looking to modernize the nation's connectivity infrastructure. According to the press release, they're looking to unlock the next wave of cloud-driven innovation for United States businesses. The companies plan to combine AT&T's expansive fiber network with the security, reliability, performance, and AI capabilities of AWS to create a more resilient, adaptive, and future-ready connectivity solution. So where does space come into all of that? Well, satellite connectivity, of course, but you knew that because you're smart. Amazon Leo, formerly known as Project Kuiper, which is Amazon's low-Earth orbit satellite network, will provide internet connectivity services to AT&T, enabling AT&T to broaden its connectivity capabilities and deliver fixed broadband services to business customers in areas where such services are needed, which I would imagine is just about everywhere. They just need to get those satellites into Leo now, don't they? So the A team think that they've got the answers to planet Earth's connectivity issues. I pity the fool, but doesn't see this as the start of a beautiful, lucrative partnership. And that's a reference to Mr. T for our audience that don't get the reference. OK. Some news now for the US Space Agency, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee unanimously approved a new NASA authorization bill. The bill reemphasizes congressional commitment to US leadership in space, especially the Moon to Mars Human Exploration Program. More than three dozen amendments were considered, and almost all were adopted by voice vote. Although an amendment to assess challenges was moving, the space shuttle Discovery to Houston was withdrawn, and another to improve NASA's ability to detect drones entering its airspace was defeated. Authorization bills set policy and are important indicators of the level of congressional support for various agency activities. However, and this is a big however, they do not provide any money. About as big a however as you can get. Still, this is just an indicator that there is still bipartisan support for NASA and space activities in the immediate years to come. Speaking of NASA, Interloon has been awarded a NASA Small Business Technology Transfer, or CITR, Phase 1 contract. CITR funding supports several NASA missions, including Artemis mission objectives and long-term lunar sustainability goals under the agency's Space Technology Mission Directorate. The modest $150,000 contract will focus on developing analytical models, engineering standards, and testing hardware to inform the future design of Interloon's multi-purpose lunar trenching and excavation technology. Interloon and the Colorado School of Mines, shout out to the Colorado School of Mines, will focus on reducing attractive force, power consumption, and dust compared to traditional trench digging techniques. The expected outcome is a design that can be used across multiple commercial and government applications, including Interloon's Helium-3 harvesting operations and site prep for NASA's Artemis moon base. And staying with funding awards, going a little bit north of Colorado now to Montana, Montana State University has been awarded an established program to stimulate competitive research, or EPSCORE grant. The $750,000 award from NASA aims to help researchers at Montana State University work to limit the impact of atmospheric turbulence in quantum laser communications links between ground stations and space terminals. The project is titled Programmable Photonics for Quantum Space Networks, and it's funded through September 2028. And let's head on over to Europe now. And European security officials are warning that Russian space vehicles have intercepted communications from at least a dozen key European satellites. The exposed data could allow Moscow not only to gather sensitive information, but also potentially interfere with, or even disable, spacecraft. The suspected interceptions involve two Russian satellites known as Luch-1 and Luch-2. According to orbital data and ground-based telescope observations, the two satellites have repeatedly maneuvered into close proximity with Europe's most critical geostationary satellites. And these spacecraft provide comms services across Europe, the UK, and large parts of Africa and the Middle East. Officials warned that once command data is intercepted and recorded, it could be used to interfere with satellite operations at a later stage. One day, hopefully, the whole satellite industry will figure out that unencrypted data, anywhere and everywhere, is just straight up a bad idea. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] And that wraps up today's top five stories, whether you're turning into T-minus for the first time or for the 500th time. I'm going to have to lose 1,000 episodes now. Can you believe it? We want to know what you think of our show. So yeah, friends, how are we doing? You can tell us with our listener surveys, no matter effect. It only takes a few minutes to fill out, and you can rest assured that we will be pouring over your feedback. Link to the surveys in the show notes for you, along with the links to further reading on all of the stories that I've mentioned throughout today's show. And thanks. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] We've got another chat today for you from Commercial Space Week in Florida, from the show floor, in fact. And our guest today is Ryan Kirby, junior partner at Alderman and Company. [MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Ryan Kirby, junior partner of Alderman and Company. And we are Aerospace and Defense M&A specialists on the south side. Excellent. So pleasure to be here. Why don't we start first with your firm and in the realm of aerospace and murders and acquisitions when we talk about M&A. Set the scene for me a little bit about what you all do. So we are a middle market aerospace and defense specialist. So what that means is if you've got a company that's about $20 million in value, up to around $150 million in value, enterprise total value, we believe we are specialists in helping you sell your company. So just like you would hire a broker to sell your home if you were selling your home, we are specialists in this space of anything aerospace and defense of this size and US based primarily. We've done some outside, but that's specifically what we market. And we help you speak to the right buyers. We help you prepare all the materials that you would need. Imagine there's a lot. And there's a lot of pitfalls and potential issues and things. So we help navigate that pretty treacherous path. And then we go through the process, help our clients, talk to potential buyers. It's a two way street, interview them and get interviewed as well. And then hopefully have a successful exit on the end of it. Can you tell me a little bit about having expertise specifically in aerospace in this field? I imagine there are a lot of pitfalls that you have to have some very specialized knowledge to be able to avoid, not just in finance, but specifically in aerospace. Tell me a bit about that. Yeah, I like the question. What you see on the trade show floor here at Spacecom is a lot of companies that have similar levels of quality. And that's one of the key things that you see throughout aerospace and defenses, quality approvals. There's a lot of overlap in the mission critical component that is the work that they do. So a lot of folks will say to us, oh, why don't you start doing deals in automotive industry? And we say, well, hang on, volumes, customer base, and quality, it is a different ball game altogether. The only similar, I guess, adjacency, if you see a little bit of medical, what's mission critical for a human? Well, if I have something in my heart that's keeping me alive, I would consider that mission critical. Kind of don't want to die. Yeah. So I think it's incredibly important to have a boutique specialist in what you do. Primarily because of all the preparation work that goes into preparing yourself for a sale, it's really important to make sure that you don't miss any of the key considerations in this space that potential buyers will uncover during their due diligence when they're vetting out, during their buy due diligence. It's critical that you've got ahead of the majority of those potential issues. Can you tell me about some of those key considerations? There's a couple things, and maybe it's a good thing for a couple of the listeners maybe to take away if they're a small or mid-sized business that are looking to exit. A couple of key things that we see time and time again. The first thing I would say is not valuing the amount of value that is in their projection set. Not valuing the amount of value when they're-- OK, so tell me about that. Yeah. One of the key things is potential buyers, when they buy something, they're taking over a company and then running it in the future. So say if you did X million dollars of revenue last year, but then this year you will fall off of a cliff and you'll lose major customers. Well, the potential buyer cares about the future and what they're going to own rather than what was done historically. Historically, it's really important and it shows great trends. And we work with mature businesses that typically have 10 plus years of profits of some extent, mature businesses, especially in this space industry that we're sat in right now. It's a little bit harder to find, but there's some really amazing companies that are emerging. And this room is filled with incredible entrepreneurs and things. But overall, what I see time and time again is sellers going, putting together a projection set that is not really defendable. They don't have clear, bolstered plans to defend that and why that's the case and backlog and all these different things that would prove it. Is it inflated projections or deflated? It all depends. Depends, OK. If you have it inflated or maybe more aggressive is maybe a term I would use, but it's more defendable. The more aggressive you are, the more defense you will have to have. So if you have very conservative projections, you'll have to have less defense. So I think that's maybe one thing for potential sellers to think about in the future. And one other thing, maybe some parting wisdom, would be overall think about preparing for a sale well in advance of doing so. There's so many things that have very long lead times. Estate planning, tax planning, financial controls and policies, it takes a lot of time. And planning well in advance will help you, will maximize value for you and your business, and will increase the certainty of closing when you get into that discussions of potential buyers as well. So a couple of things to think about. Interesting. Well, I appreciate that. I had been reading anecdotally in the end of year 2025 projections for the coming year that many people are predicting this is going to be a huge year for M&A in this space. I'm curious what you think of that and if yes, why? I think overall this year, I see the potential buying landscape growing of companies in this sector. We're seeing more and more companies entering interest into this industry. And they're also valuing space exposure more so, if not just as much as some of the more legacy commercial aviation and defense programs that they're on as well. So lots of upside. What does that mean? Getting back to your question of overall M&A activity for this year. I do see it continue on an upward path. Some key high level outlook items for the industry. You see similar public companies that are traded in this space. You've got OEMs that have a lot of exposure all over the place and nailing them down as a good indicator of the space industry I don't think is helpful. But if you look at a couple more pure play, space, public company, comps, comparable companies, you have Planet Labs, you have AST, Space, Mobile. When you look back one year from now, you look at a one year return, those stocks are 400 plus percent, which is hard to find companies of that growth plan across the New York Stock Exchange. Another example, Rocket Labs, up 200 plus percent over this past year. Then it's not all up, you pick and choose, you have red wire and you have a couple of others that are a bit flat, flatlining or turning downwards a little bit. But overall valuations are strong in the public markets. In the large private market, we see very recently SpaceX trying to raise $50 billion or so of capital and I think valuation placed on that from what I've seen recently went $1.5 trillion. So overall valuations are strong in the industry. A number of those public companies that I mentioned are actually cash flow negative, but they're still seeing good strong growth in their stock price, which is a good indicator of overall investor sentiment and what do they believe in for the future. What we're seeing in the companies we work with day to day, which is the supply chain for these companies, a smaller owner of operated family businesses a lot of the time, they are cash flow positive. Those are the folks that we're working with. I see my final comment on this very open-ended question, which I love and could talk about all day, is overall we see companies in this space. The space industry is to me what the defense industrial base was like five years ago, which was in hourglass shape, which was a lot of big players at the top, not necessarily in terms of number of big players, but in terms of size. Yeah, yeah. Large concentration at the top. And then on the polar opposite, at the bottom of the hourglass shape, lots of companies that are really small. And the middle was lacking. I've been coming to Spacecom for about five years now, maybe six years, and one, the growth has been incredible. I bet. I bet. I mean, this room in general is significantly larger than it was a little while ago. But there was a great speech last year that said, we're missing the middle. Interesting. And I see the space industry developing into less of a missing the middle. I see a lot of M&A activity of that size in the middle, this coming year and in the next couple of years. And I think we'll continue to see that in the near future as well. Sounds like healthy signs for the maturity of the market overall, honestly. I agree with that 100%. Fascinating. Is there anything I missed that you wanted to mention to the audience, by the way? No, just an exciting time to be in this industry, and an exciting time for M&A. If you have a mature company that is something you would consider selling in five to 10 year time frame, just start thinking about how would I prepare that to sell one day. If you're not thinking about your exit plan, then I encourage you to think about it, even if it's longer term than that. So I would say that's something certainly to consider. And as I said, it's an exciting space to be in. See number of objects being launched per year increasing year over year, slight correction in 2024. But I think that was an adjustment of quality, not quantity. And then in 2025, it was an incredible year for number of objects and launch numbers themselves as well. So overall, exciting time to be in this industry. And also, please think about your exit. Think about putting a team together for your exit, no matter what that time frame is as well. [MUSIC] We'll be right back. Welcome back. It's official. Many of us can now say something that we did in elementary school is officially a space research project. You genius you. Yeah. Well, no, it's not macaroni art and it's certainly nothing involving glitter. But did your class ever learn about how a caterpillar metamorphced into a butterfly? And then did you watch the little hungry caterpillar eat and eat and eat and then turn into that chrysalis and then patiently wait for the gorgeous new butterfly to emerge? Well, guess what? China's space program has now done that too. Third graders of the world rejoice. It's honestly very unique when you think about it. A caterpillar successfully went through metamorphosis and became a butterfly all while living in microgravity inside a sealed, self-sustaining life support payload in orbit. Plants supplied oxygen and food and microorganisms, handled the waste. The butterfly's ability to emerge, move and survive in microgravity offers a small and honestly beautiful little proof point that indeed close loop ecosystems in Leo can support more complex life. And yes, I know you're wondering. Yes indeed, the butterfly did actually fly around. It seems that it adjusted to microgravity pretty well. Well, maybe adjusted isn't the right word since it was born in space after all. Really, that's the only environment that it had ever known. In any case, this closed loop system was operated completely uncrewed. So no human handled any of this once it was on orbit. And the chief designer of this project, Chie Gengshin, said this is not simply another space insect, but about further demonstrating the feasibility of running relatively complex life support systems in orbit over extended periods. The butterfly effect from this butterfly experiment will be very fascinating to watch over the coming years. That is for sure. [MUSIC PLAYING] And that's T-minus, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of our podcast. Your feedback ensures that we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like the show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey and the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com. We're proud that N2K Cyberwire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector, from the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. N2K helps space and cybersecurity professionals grow, learn, and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you the people, the technology, and the ideas, shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how at N2K.com. N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Tre Hester, with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpe is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time. [MUSIC PLAYING] P-minus. [EXPLOSION] (whooshing) [BLANK_AUDIO]
